The Disembodied Internet

But now I want to get from there to an issue which isn't computers. I got
interested in writing this book about the Internet because there's no longer
a question of making artificial minds by using computers. Heidegger trashed
AI and it trashed itself. But now, people have said -- it's hard to remember,
it's only maybe ten years ago -- that the marvelous thing about the Internet
is that we don't have to have bodies on the Internet; in
cyberspace, everybody is in touch with everybody else, nobody's limited by
their body, by how they look, by their local situation. I have a good friend
-- I dedicate the book to him, Nat Goldhaber, who is an
important venture capitalist, who said, "Isn't it great? We're
going to be able to sell everything on the Internet and see everything on
the Internet, and our bodies will be irrelevant."

There were people called "extropians" at MIT who said, "We'll
become immortal because everything that's important about us is what we can
transmit on the Internet and everything else, that mortal part of us,
we can leave behind." So, there was all this anti-body hype, and there's
where Merleau-Ponty comes in, because in the quote you read, Merleau-Ponty
says that it's our body with its skills which enables us to relate to things
by going around them, and relate to people by this interesting capacity called
intercorporeality, where I don't have to figure out from your gestures and
how you look what you're thinking and what you're doing, I respond immediately
with my gestures and my look. To Merleau-Ponty that intercorporeality seemed
magical. Whenever he couldn't explain anything that was his word
for it.

Now they've discovered something called mirror neurons. It turns out
that the same neurons in apes that perceive a certain movement, if I'm grasping
for something [for example], also are the neurons that produce the movement,
so that it's no accident that when you see me doing it, you directly respond.
They never mention yawning, but yawning would be
the clearest case of this. Yawning is intercorporeality. If things are boring
and I yawn, you don't have to figure out what it meant, you can't help but
yawn. So, Merleau-Ponty describes all the ways the body is, as he puts it,
geared into the world. And that's what the Internet definitely leaves out.

I just have to put in another comment -- a book I didn't show you because
I didn't write it, but I published it, in a sense. There was a fellow graduate
student named Samuel Todes who was very influential on me. I didn't mention
him when we talked about my graduate [years], but if I went into Continental
philosophy it was also largely because he was the only one I could talk to.
He had this idea -- it's very important -- that the body has a structure.
In Merleau-Ponty you hear always that the body has a capacity to act, to
be open to the world, to go around objects, but Todes says, "Well, we've
got a front and a back, an up and a down, we move forward more easily than
we move backward, we can't protect ourselves from behind." There's a
lot to having a body that Merleau-Ponty doesn't see. So, I published Todes'
book, Body and World, because I think it's the next stage that people
will have to pay attention to. I talked about it in my presidential address.
This says that until computers could (which I don't think they ever will,)
have bodies enough like ours, and feelings like ours, they can't be intelligent.

And now the Internet: if we were disembodied on the Internet, we wouldn't
be able to acquire skills, we wouldn't be able to see what was relevant and
not relevant, we wouldn't be able to relate to other people. So, the Internet
turns out to be a marvelous example of
what we can and can't do without a body.

I think my Internet book is, in a sense, out of date. All this hype about
how our civilization is going to be changed by the Internet, it's as important
as the discovery of writing and so forth -- it's all gone. I mean, the Internet
is a very, very useful tool. It's like the telephone, about as philosophically
interesting and important. They both are disembodied. And it's interesting
how the phone is more embodied because you can hear somebody, and how embodiment
is creeping into the Internet. With Skype, my wife and kids are all doing
international conferences now, talking to each other over the Internet, because
clearly talking is better than messaging because there's a hint of the body
in the voice -- not fully, but beginning to be.